Regarding Mr Bond
by Trivial Pursuit
Summary: After the dust had settled they had to get on with their lives. He wasn't coming back.
1. Chapter 1: Die Another Day

**Giacinta 'Jinx' Johnson**

They both know it's a fling, nothing serious, just a little bit of on-mission amusement. He's exciting, interesting, educated, and the sex is great, but it's not going to last.

And it doesn't.

They rarely see each other after that mission. A few hotel hook-ups, but nothing that anyone could describe as a real relationship. But that's okay, she knows he's not the man she wants to have children with and he's never going to settle down enough for her to find out. She's not the woman of his dreams (that boat's either long gone or yet to come), but she's a suitable substitute in his reality.

Charles is different, he's polite, gentlemanly, but never underestimates her, never treats her as breakable as some of her previous lovers have done nor expendable as Falco does. He can separate work and personal, even when she can't. And she appreciate that.

And he loves her. And she loves him. She loves the way he brings her a croissant the morning after they have sex. How he says 'Miss Johnson' whenever they work together, sending delicious shivers down her spine. How he tells her she's beautiful and that he loves her every chance he gets. How he calls her 'His Lucky Thirteen' and gives her things to match; thirteen red roses, thirteen diamonds in a necklace, thirteen days of vacation every year over her birthday, thirteen songs on a playlist he made, ending with a recording of his voice asking her to marry him. She's always been a jinx but he makes it feel like it's not such a bad thing.

They get married, only a few people in attendance, both their bosses, a few colleagues. No real friends, no family, they've alienated both a long time ago. They watch _The Graduat_e together and he whispers in her ear. He calls her 'Mrs Robinson' at work and makes it sound all kinds of dirty.

He transfers to the embassy in New York and they live in a nice apartment in Brooklyn. She goes on missions and he takes care of wayward spies. Then she gets pregnant and things change, she gets fewer missions and he becomes 'Mr Mum'. They have a beautiful little girl named Eleanor, with her hair and his eyes, who smiles and laughs and makes everything seem just a little bit brighter. A few years later they have a son, Henry, who was a surprise but never a mistake. She takes a desk job and he stays home.

It's not perfect, but it's real.


	2. Chapter 2: The World is Not Enough

**Dr Christmas Jones, PhD.**

He leaves her in Istanbul a few weeks after they foil Renard's attempt to blow up the city. She cries for a little bit, she's not ashamed to admit. He'd seemed like the perfect guy, smart, witty, never underestimated her.

But she gets over it. She goes back to Kazakstan to diffuse more bombs. The once dangerous and adrenalin-filled work has lost it's allure. She finds it monotonous and dull. She misses his Christmas jokes and how he'd take her on whirlwind nights through the city, to clubs, theatres, cinemas, dance halls, bars. It's wild and new, She'd spent most of her high school and college years with her nose to the grindstone. Not going to parties, instead staying home and studying, getting through high school two years early, taking summer university courses, working three jobs and applying for infinite scholarships and bursaries just to pay for her schooling costs, living on ramen and chips for eight years in a crapshack basement apartment with a mysterious mould growing in her bathroom and no hot water.

So when this wonderful, incredible, fantastic, exotic, sexy man blows into he life, opening a whole new castle of door for her the blows right out again. she can't say it was unexpected because that would be lying. Christmas Jones is many things but a liar isn't one of them.

But she gets over it.

She hangs around in Kazakstan for as long as she can, it's not real life there, it's like suspended animation, nothing happens, nothing changes. James was just a blip on an otherwise smooth line. But, like everyone else, eventually she has to return to real life.

She gets tenure at the University of Istanbul, she walks the streets he once showed to her for the first time, goes to the bars and restaurants that he took her to with her colleagues, delighting them with the little backstreet dives and being delighted in return. She goes on dates, even falls in love a few times, but nothing lasts. Her mother used to say 'how can you keep a girl on the farm once she's seen Paris?'. He's Paris and he's fucking _spoiled_ her for everyone else and she fucking _hates_ him for it. Because now all she can do is compare men to James Freaking Bond and what guy can stand up to that?

But Christmas Jones is a survivor and like all good survivors she has to adapt.


	3. Chapter 3: The Living Daylights

**Kara Milvoy**

She knew it wouldn't last as soon as she didn't see him at her concert, knew it even when he pulled that silly and rather sweet trick on her. Because there would be times when it wasn't a trick, when he had to work and she wants things that he can't give her; kids, truth, safety, fidelity.

In the end it's the last one that breaks the camel's back. He coms home with a smear of decidedly foreign lipstick on his neck and she simply can't take it anymore. She doesn't blame him, he's a shark who needs to keep moving, but she packs up her bags and her cello and hops the first flight she can get to Afghanistan. She's at a lull in her performing and she knows Kamran will be fine with her curling up and licking her wounds in his den. He takes time out of his day to come talk to her, listen to her play, provides her with handkerchiefs and a shoulder to get snot on when she feels like she could fill the Atlantic up with tears, feeds her, shelters her.

One day, about two weeks into her stay she realises she's not in love with James anymore. Kamran is teaching her to play chess, talking about how a pawn can make its ay across the board to become a queen, and she realises it's no longer James' eyes that make her stomach flip-flop uncomfortably, it's not James anymore and it never will be again.

The wedding is a quiet affair but it's perfect. Everybody she could possibly want to be there is there save one, and he comes rappelling down from a helicopter in combat gear, all covered in cuts and bruises at the eleventh hour to walk her down the aisle and give her away.

Life isn't perfect, she still travels a lot performing and he still rides around on a horse waving a gun in the air, but they're together for all the important things; the birth of all their children, grandchildren, and a few great-grandchildren, anniversaries, winter holidays, graduations, and every spare moment they can find.

All things considered, Kara Shah has a pretty fantastic life.


	4. Chapter 4: GoldenEye

**Natalya Fyodorovna Simonova**

Things deteriorate between her and James rather quickly after the rush of saving the world and nearly having sex in front of a whole platoon of United States Marines. To be more exact, they swan around Havana for a few weeks before he gets called away on a mission and MI6 sticks her on a plane back to Russia.

What happens when the agents drag her off the plane is not her finest hour. She moves back in with her parents for about a week until her mother is practically drowning her in borscht and she wants to scream. So she takes her meagre funds and buys a crappy apartment with pipes that leak and goes off her shiny new job as a data analyst for the CIA station in Moscow.

She meets Pyotr who plays hockey, has really great arms, and has no clue how to use a computer. And she admits it, he made her a bit stupid as arms and smiles tend to do to a girl recently off a bad 'breakup'. They get married, which ranks up right next to her post-breakup altercation with MI6 agents trying to get her off a plane. She looks beautiful and her father walks her down the aisle of her childhood church in a fluffy white dress with a train and for a little while, Natalya Ivanova is happy, playing hockey wife to her husband and analysing whatever data the CIA deigns to give her. But, the truth of the matter is she can't stand her husband. He's dumb, ignorant, foolish, brutish, and just generally a bad representative of his sex.

The afternoon she comes home from drawing up the divorce papers with her lawyer she finds him on the couch with a blonde's hands down his pants. She is not impressed.

But she gets over it. The night after her divorce is finalized Jack Wade takes her out for drinks and she spends the night. That night turns into a second, eventually a year has passed and suddenly he's getting reassigned to Langley and takes her with him. And so she's not living in a crappy Soviet apartment anymore, she's in a house in Georgetown, Virginia that's covered with ivy and has a white picket fence and a garage. Suddenly she's pregnant and they've got twin boys and a minivan.

She'd be lying if she said she didn't occasionally miss her homeland, but what she has here in America isn't so bad.


	5. Chapter 5: Licence to Kill

**Pamela Bouvier**

James Bond is an asshole.

She figures this out sometime between their second week in Isthmus City and the day he leaves her for 'a little day trip to Istanbul'. She goes back to Miami after two weeks of hanging around waiting for him and goes to visit Felix in the hospital. He's alarmingly chipper for a guy who lost a leg to a shark and his wife of not quite ten hours to a kingpin. The nurses catch him trying to saw through his veins with an IV needle. She starts to visit him every day, she takes his cards and cigarettes and whatever else she thinks he might like.

Eventually Felix is released from the hospital and she stays with him to keep him from downing the painkillers he was prescribed. It gets so bad that after a few months of this she takes him out over the Gulf of Mexico in her plane and opens the door. He stays in his seat and that evening he makes her dinner.

Soon he goes back to work and it's a painful sight to see him hobbling down the walk to his car every morning, knowing it should be Della watching him because she's his wife not Pam because if she wasn't here he'd be dead. After a while she goes back to flying and he asks her to stay with him to help cover the cost of the house. So she stays in the house with a hollow man and the ghost of a dead woman and she keeps them both alive.

Pam fucking hates every minute of it. She hates it when she catches Felix talking to Della over his morning coffee. She hates it when she has to clean up the broken frame of the wedding photo. She hates it when she hears him crying in his sleep. But mostly, she hates that she can't leave, because if she left it would just be the hollow man and his ghostly wife.

Felix asks her out on a date and she suddenly realises it's been nigh on eight years since James Bond swept through her life like a windstorm and shook everything up. That realisation is followed by quickly by a recognition of the fact that thinking that doesn't hurt anymore. She doesn't cry over his martini choices but rather thinks about what she and Felix would like for dinner, when her next flight is scheduled, what she's going to wear tomorrow.

The date goes well and soon there's seconds and thirds. Felix cleans out Della's closet.

They get married in April in a church with all their friends and family around them. And, for the first time in her life, Pamela Leiter feels like the belle of the ball. Eventually she gets pregnant and they have to have a Talk. Felix takes a desk job and out pops Delilah Jamie Leiter. Timothy Roger, Dahlia Amelia, and Felix John follow in quick succession.

She and Felix still fight, but, all in all, Pamela Leiter is a pretty happy person.


	6. Chapter 6: Quantum of Solace

**Camille Montes Rivero**

It was never about sex, love, companionship, whatever you wanted to call it. It was simply a parallelism of interests. In never could be anything else, he was a broken man unwilling to mourn for someone he'd cared for very deeply. If she'd made it about anything else she'd have both deluded both herself and broken him.

'Make it count,' he'd told her, and she fucking does.

She hangs around Bolivia after he drops her off. She hangs around too long for she begins to hate her homeland, because it's no longer her mother but her prison. It keeps her barred in from that great big world outside, keeps her from making her one, shitty little life count for something.

So she leaves, breaks free from her prison on a flight to Moscow. She dances at the Bolshoi for a few months, nothing big, only the _corps de ballet_ and an understudy at that, but it's worth it. The feeling of standing on stage and spinning is like nothing else in the world.

So that's what she does, like a drug addict trying to replicate that first high, she dances her way across the stages of the world, big and small. She loves it.

She stretches her legs and suddenly the world is her oyster. Her favourite role is the Firebird, though she only gets to play it once or twice. The Firebird makes her think of James.

Eventually, though, like all dancers she becomes too old, unable to go up on her toes and dance for her roses and she is trapped again, though this time in Paris, where she, the ageing ballerina slips into the background. She lives in a tiny apartment she's painted dark red in the Quartier de la Madeleine, it is small and overpriced and she loves it. Her neighbours call her Madame Montes and she wonders what Medrano and Dominic would think if they saw her now. She scrapes by giving dance lessons and teaching Spanish, and even if it's not what she imagined doing with her life she loves it.

She made it count.


	7. Chapter 7: Tomorrow Never Dies

**Wai Lin**

She and James are separated by the crush of superiors, navy officers, general hubbub and paperwork with brief and half sincere promises to meet up as soon as they're pulled off the raft. But they don't. She never expected they would, he got what he wanted out of the relationship and so did she.

She gets out of the game a few months after what is being referred to, when it has to be referred to at all, as the Carver Affair and becomes the Beijing correspondent for _the Independent_. It was a difficult decision, she'll admit that. But she saw the way her country was losing its integrity and she could not allow herself to become part of that, so she watches.

Eventually one of her pieces makes her a _persona non grata_ in her homeland and so she moves to London and works on the Asian desk for _the Economist_. She gains some renown in her field, winning several awards and getting several offers for bigger things.

She gets married, and the first few years are married bliss. They have a beautiful little boy names Eliot, and he lights up their worlds, but her life diverges from her husband's and she joins the 45% of divorcées. She gets custody and it's tough sometimes, raising a kid by herself, but she manages. She's pretty sure she won't be getting a 'Mom of the Year' award anytime soon, but Child Services hasn't come knocking, so, all things considered, she's not doing so badly.

Her articles get anthologized and eventually collected. She writes books and goes on television (Though this always makes her wary). She gives lectures on foreign policy and espionage. She is respected and successful. It's not exactly what she imagined when she started out in life, but it's pretty fantastic.

She sees James at a summit she's covering. He looks the same, she thinks, but not. He's older, tired, no longer quite so devil may care as he once was. She nods in acknowledgement and he returns the gesture. It is the action of casual acquaintances, nothing more. They are not friends, ex-lovers, colleagues, comrades. They are merely two people whose, for a brief point, lives intersected.

She grows older, ageing gracefully, her hair slowly greying, the lines framing her mouth deepening. She gets to see her son graduate from a prestigious university and get a job in a field he loves. She watches as her son waits for the woman he loves to walk down the aisle. She's there for the birth of two grandchildren, and in turn, they're there when, at the ripe old age of ninety-eight, she dies.


End file.
